Moho 13 vs 12.5, preview quality loss?

[jahnocli]

Well, I can see straight away that the "Images" checkbox is not selected on the right -- does this have any bearing on the situation (If they are supposed to be identical?)

[arglborps]

My typical workflow is to rig and animate characters in Moho, use Moho's Layer Comps to output render passes, and then composite, light, and add effects using After Effects. Most of the work on my last two demo reels had been done this way.

Thanks for the info. So the way I figured out to do my animations isn't that far away from how professional animators do it. Good to know.

How do you deal with a case where you have two characters interacting in a scene, e.g. one walks towards the camera in a scene, and you want to render out both characters separately so you can do the compositing and lighting in AE (or in my case Apple Motion)?

Normally I just try to render out every character at the largest needed size and place them in 3D space in Motion and do my compositing – resolution is sufficient in most cases, but if, say, one of them walks towards the camera from full body shot to ultra closeup – how do you handle this? Render the characters in 4k so you can zoom in on them in AE? But 4k would take forever to render, right?

[synthsin75]

Normally I just try to render out every character at the largest needed size and place them in 3D space in Motion and do my compositing – resolution is sufficient in most cases, but if, say, one of them walks towards the camera from full body shot to ultra closeup – how do you handle this? Render the characters in 4k so you can zoom in on them in AE? But 4k would take forever to render, right?

Even wholly in Moho, there can be the need to swap between versions of a character that more readable for distance or closeup. So if nothing else, only render 4k for the frames that absolutely need it and swap resolution versions when needed. Don't know off hand if the transition can be as smooth as in Moho.

[Greenlaw]

How do you deal with a case where you have two characters interacting in a scene, e.g. one walks towards the camera in a scene, and you want to render out both characters separately so you can do the compositing and lighting in AE (or in my case Apple Motion)?

It depends on the level of interaction in the scene. For example, I believe the Thighsander and Norge shots from King Julien (on my 2017 demo reel,) were rendered as a single Layer Comp. Technically, I could have rendered them separately , but it wasn't necessary because the lighting effects are pretty basic here. Plus, because the characters are holding hands, it was just easier deal with this way.

When I need explicitly separate the lighting and shadow elements for each character, then I'll create separate Layer Comps for each character. I'll do this so I can get a clean alpha of each character to work with. When I need to be especially particular with a lighting effect, I'll break out passes for some of the body parts. For example, on my 2019 reel, if you look at Po's left hand when he's up in the sky, you can see a subtel rim effect on the inside of his hand to separate it from the arm and body. To achieve that, I set an extra Layer Comp for just his hand (paw?) and used its alpha channel to create the 'inside light' effect.

As you might have gathered by now, the Layer Comps window and Moho Exporter are some of my best friends.

Normally I just try to render out every character at the largest needed size and place them in 3D space in Motion and do my compositing – resolution is sufficient in most cases, but if, say, one of them walks towards the camera from full body shot to ultra closeup – how do you handle this? Render the characters in 4k so you can zoom in on them in AE? But 4k would take forever to render, right?

I typically do the 3D positioning and movements inside Moho, especially if the characters are interacting with each other or with animated props. This can be done by moving the groups and/or camera in z-space. This usually doesn't include camera movements unless I really need to see a parallax effect that I feel is easy enough to do in Moho.

Most of the time, I do my camera motions in After Effects since I'm doing the final compositing there anyway. This way, I maintain more interactivity and have more options at the end of the process, and probably will not need to go back to Moho or other animation programs I may have used to create my layers.

That said, I'll probably still set up non-rendering (i.e., set to 'Do Not Render' in Group Settings) proxy version of the environment in Moho for visual reference. This way, I can accurately place the characters for my Layer Comps. By setting it to 'Do Not Render', I can prevent accidentally rendering it even when it's visible in a Layer Comp.

But if I'm animating a really complicated camera motion, I might assemble the environment and char layers in a dedicated 3D animation program (in my case, LightWave or Maya) and animate the camera there. For advanced camera choreography, it's just faster and easier to animate the camera in a 3D program because there are better camera rigging options available. Then, I'll render out my 3D passes for my compositing program.

(In short, regardless of where creating my animations, everything eventually ends up in compositing. At my workplace, this is usually in After Effects, and sometimes Nuke; at my home studio, this is either in After Effects or Fusion.)

As for rendering 4k in Moho, render time is not usually a problem for me because when I'm using Layer Comps, the background pixels are mostly empty (transparent.) Of course, that's not likely for background art renders, but since I'm compositing in another program anyway, I just never bother rendering 4k backgrounds from Moho. It's not necessary, and it's more efficient to simply assemble the 4k BG images in your compositing program and render from there with your camera's final framing and resolution.

Come to think of it, I had to do exactly that a couple of weeks ago at work: I rendered 4 characters from Moho in a single Layer Comp called 'Char' at 4k. For this Layer Comp, I did not animate the camera because I was going to do that in Ae. 'Char' rendered quickly because most of the 'background' was transparent pixels. I didn't bother rendering from Moho 1.) that would take a hideously long time, and 2.) a single frame still image in Ae would serve the same purpose.

(The exception is when I've created the background art within Moho, in which case, I'm rendering a single frame from Moho, not an animation, so it's probably quick render too. The point is, when you're compositing, you can optimize your render times from Moho by rendering fewer and simpler element. This way, if you need to change or fix an animation, you only need to render the affected Layer Comps and frame range, not the entire thing again. BTW, this is one of many reasons why I never render a movie file from Moho. It's more efficient to render frames from any animation program (2D or 3D,) and leave the movie file output for the compositing program.)

Finally, after assembling my 'char' layer and background elements in Ae, I animated my camera in 3D. This final render will go quickly Ae because I'm not rendering a 4k image, I'm rendering only what the camera sees at either HD (720p) or FHD (1080p) res.

Hope this helps and that I wasn't too 'rambly'. (I'm known for that.)

[Greenlaw]

Oh, yeah, what Wes said too.

Rendering 4k layers from Moho, as I described above, is an exception and not a rule for me. Normally, I only render at the final resolution I need for my compositing program. In the above example, I rendered at 4k because I needed to move the camera from character in farily extreme CU and then widen out so we saw all of the characters in frame. In this case, it was easier to make a 4k precomp in Ae, and move the camera around there. Since all the character animation has been baked down to rendered frames, it's pretty trivial for Ae to deal with.

For that matter, if you just want to simplify a Moho project to improve interactivity, you can 'bake' or pre-render your character layers and import them into another Moho project as image sequences. (I've done it that way too.)

(Edit: Wait...sorry, I just checked and it bakes to a still image, not an image sequence. Still useful of course. Explanation below.)

BTW, Hayasidist created an excellent layer baking script called Bake To PNG that can be used to simplify Moho from within the project. Just select the group you want to bake and run the script by clicking a Muffin button. The script will then add an image sequence layer with your animation, and your original rig and layers remain in place (they're just hidden) so you can fall back on them when you need to. I highly recommend it!

Go here for more info...

http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtop ... ng#p182406

[Greenlaw]

Sorry, I misspoke. Bake To PNG is used to flatten a complex group to a rendered still Image layer, not an animation to an Image Sequence layer. I do use this feature a lot but it just occurred to me that baking to image sequence might have been wishful thinking on my part.

Anyway, it's still an incredibly useful feature and it can be used to simplify a project. Where I typically use it is to bake down a complex vector group into a PNG image so I can apply a Mesh Warp to it and have it deform more predictably.

[Mejin]

Hello,

well, some time has gone by... and today I opened up Moho 13.5. on a Mac... and I had to realize that my vectors are still shown in a poor quality.
Has there been a resolution by now? Or has one to work now in this 'jagged view'-state?

Best!

[Reindeer]

Hello,

well, some time has gone by... and today I opened up Moho 13.5. on a Mac... and I had to realize that my vectors are still shown in a poor quality.
Has there been a resolution by now? Or has one to work now in this 'jagged view'-state?

Best!

Hi. No, the latest version has actually solved the problem on my Mac. Visualisation is back to being normal (of course, if I want a nice view I need to render the frame).
Maybe your OS needs to be updated?

[Mejin]

Hello,

well, some time has gone by... and today I opened up Moho 13.5. on a Mac... and I had to realize that my vectors are still shown in a poor quality.
Has there been a resolution by now? Or has one to work now in this 'jagged view'-state?

Best!

Hi. No, the latest version has actually solved the problem on my Mac. Visualisation is back to being normal (of course, if I want a nice view I need to render the frame).
Maybe your OS needs to be updated?

Hello,

it is up to date... I looked into it again – and it looks better indeed!
Thanks!

Best!